


derideo

by kaegays



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: (not cannibalism. its not cannibalism when ur not human anymore.), Gen, Mild Gore, People Eating, Yokai AU, brief maggot mention, brief puke mentions, description of decomposition, oni subaru
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-01
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-04-05 18:19:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19045834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaegays/pseuds/kaegays
Summary: opening up is harder than cracking a bone in half aint it





	derideo

**Author's Note:**

> this is one of them danged 'super fleshed out au between me and my best friend that is difficult to explain' fics, this is actually the only thing i've written since shinkai which was............. 5 weeks ago  
> writing is hard!  
> PLEASE mind the warnings!!! hopefully i covered everything noteworthy!!! chara death warning covers subaru and ig the lady they munchin on! debated a violence warning!

A sickening crunch resounds, the snapping of a few bones and the wet tearing of flesh. “It was humanizing, I guess?” says a voice, airy and light and far too carefree coming from a boy tearing into a prostitute’s body, deep in the woods with nobody but him, the girl, and someone so similar but so different from him. A Yokai who lacked empathy but had never been sentenced to serve Enma. Someone who was not wicked just because of not understanding.

 

“Ah, humanizing, you say…?” There is nothing that suggests any semblance of disgust, and hardly an indication of confusion nor curiosity, the same kind of tone in which he will laugh off a beating or talk of the rain. The tearing of muscle, the stretching of a thread of skin, almost like melty cheese or a string of saliva.

 

It’s hard to describe the experience of eating oneself; it’s an experience riddled with self-reflection and wrapped in personal views… Probably. To explain this is to open yourself up, but it’s not like he doesn’t want to. He would love to.

 

It’s scary, the idea of opening up, exposing his guts and what makes him tick, leaving it out for someone to tear at, pull at, squish and mock. But it’s not unappealing, the thought that someone might be able to understand in a way that he can’t, the concept of sharing an experience with someone else.

 

And, well, he’s already gone and brought it up, hasn’t he? “Uh-huh,” Pulling off an arm and biting into it, it decidedly tastes like flesh as the blood spurts into his mouth. He barely chews before swallowing, a puff of air alongside it and he continues on to elaborating what he meant. “Like, humans are all made up the same? Bones and blood and basically a huge chunk of meat– It’s like, hard to deny something like that, right?”

 

It’s a simplified way to put it, but it seems satisfactory. Humming and wet tearing of guts to fill the silence, the next time Tsumugi speaks, it’s with a mouth full of intestines muffling his words, an absolute lack of manners that has Subaru cracking up in an overly energetic fit of laughter. Whether or not he’s actively doing it, it’s unsettling and near unhinged, the way he’s laughing as the question sinks in.

 

“What was it like?” he asks, as if there’s a succinct way to put it, as if it was a generalized experience. As if it was as mundane as asking the time. It’s funny.

 

Really, it is. Something unpleasant bubbles in his stomach, but if he pays it no mind it’ll go away. He takes another chunk out of the woman’s forearm, and wonders if she was really an okay target. Would nobody miss her? Ah, like it matters, he’s just trying to survive. It’s not his problem if she’ll be missed, though it weighs a thousand pounds on his shoulders.

 

What was it like… What  _was_  it like, actually? He never truly thought too hard on it afterwards, though he’s just never been sure he’d have been able to handle thinking about it ever again. But he brought it up, and he’s doing fine, so maybe it’s okay.

 

“…It was a few weeks after I showed up.” He does remember that, faded as the memory is becoming. Those first few weeks were miserable, though it truly was only within the second week that he finally got desperate, running out of time to eat, or– That’s how it would’ve been if he were human, and he’s not sure he wants to find out otherwise. He doesn’t want to die again. He doesn’t want to die.

 

Something heavy weighs in on his chest, but he sucks in a breath and keeps his voice steady, the sound of teeth sinking into flesh and blood gushing even after Subaru himself has stopped.

 

“I was desperate, I was… Like, I was hungry, and. I don’t know, there were so many people in that place that I could’ve picked from, but something compelled me to try and find that boy’s body?” The inability to take a life with his own hands, a problem he’s worked through since then, but a problem that had once plagued him nonetheless.

 

Hours of sneaking around, trying not to be caught, trying not to cause a fuss. He’d already been so used to sneaking out of the house, it was just a larger scale and much more at stake. Or maybe not, when it was his life at stake in the beginning, and that was no longer a problem, probably.

 

“…Found it in a well. That guy was never any good at hiding things, always had someone else do it for him or covering for him.” He laughs, wheezing and wobbling. By ‘someone’ it was implicitly  _him._   _He_  was always the one doing those things for him. “Dunno how nobody found it. Wasn’t properly taken care of, maggots ‘n crap got to it and everything already.” He’d made that mistake before, not properly burying the body, assuming it’d be fine to leave it for the animals or a kitsune or something. He was 7. He didn’t make that mistake again. It’s really gross, anyway, that would’ve been enough motivation to learn to do better.

 

“It was gross. Smelled awful, looked awful. Fungus-y and bugged up, all decompose-y and stuff… Really not prime meat.” A wave of nausea settles in from his own choice of words, but as long as he doesn’t treat this like anything special it’ll be fine, right…? “Couldn’t even tell what color the eyes used to be. Didn’t look like a 14 year old at all, but it didn’t look like an adult either. Just looked kinda dead?” Of course he did, because he was. But it was just weird, seeing what time would do to an unattended body. Unsettling, sickening, horrifying, however else someone less used to it might describe it.

 

But he grew up around death, so it wasn’t as bad. Probably? He laughs, rapid and weak. It’s hard to stay under wraps talking about this stuff, huh? But once he started, he just… Can’t stop.

 

“It smelt  _awful_ , I can’t believe nobody found out. I think that was probably the first time I’d teared up like that?” It wasn’t, but he’ll spare his pride admitting that he broke down in the first week before shutting those feelings down entirely. “I gagged. I felt like I was gonna be sick. I don’t know how I was able to even  _think_  about eating it at that point– Like, it smelt soooooooo _ooooooo_  bad, it  _had_  to taste even  _worse_ , right? And you know? It did!” He laughs again, more choked this time and coming out more like a cough. He still laughs. “It really did! It was disgusting! It was food, but at what cost, right? I wouldn’t starve, but that’s assuming I’d even keep it down! I really did think I was gonna puke!”

 

Breathe in, breathe out, he’s starting to babble in panicked, barely coherent sentences. He’s fine, he really is, he just can’t BREATHE. Smacking away the outstretched hand with a hasty “I’m fine!” before he can even finish asking “Are you okay?”, he sucks in another deep breath and sighs out slow. It’s fine, he can take it. Just don’t touch him, he’s fine, he can handle this, he’s fine. Another weak laugh, a quiet and rasping “Sorry. I’m okay.” and then he’s continuing, however reluctantly.

 

“I… What I mean by humanizing, is… I didn’t know if I was the same, because everyone… ‘s like… You know? You get what I mean?” He’s being incoherent and vague and he knows it, but how are you even supposed to explain this feeling? What even is it? And Tsumugi’s smiling, but he can hear the ‘Sorry, I don’t’ without him even saying so.

 

It’s more than a little discouraging, his throat tries to close off, but he can’t just trail off, he has to end it proper before he shuts down his attempts at opening up to another person. He was dumb thinking he’d understand, huh?

 

“Like, if I still felt like vomiting eating a human,” He more than felt like it, he did puke a few times before it’d stay down in his stomach-like place. “if tearing apart my body showed muscles and blood and veins and organs, if I had all the bones and placements of a human being, then… Then I definitely  _was_  a human at some point.” Even if it never felt like it, even if he never had the chance to take advantage of that realization, even if it only came after his head was bashed in from behind.

 

Even despite all that, he was still once human. That’s what was so humanizing about it– It was a very literal one, the confirmation that he was just as human as everyone else that had looked like him, that he was just a weird human and not an alien or monster.

 

It was a humanizing experience, not a comforting one.

 

And the look of attempted pity is so far off from what he wanted out of this confession that it’s frustrating, the tone in which Tsumugi softly calls out his name is irritating, he can’t stand being here anymore, he can’t, he can’t, he’s going to explode, he can’t–

 

“Well!” It’s loud, it’s abrupt, it’s a burst of turning his bad feelings into the energy to force his way rudely out of the situation, an effort to protect what’s left of his mutilated pride. Up on his feet, startling Tsumugi into falling backwards, he’s already storming off in a random direction, yelling out that “I’m full! Help yourself, I’m gonna find Natsume~!” when he has no real intention of doing that, leaving faster than Tsumugi can respond, and not caring about the fact that he was just incredibly rude, because that situation was just  _too much._

 

Tsumugi can only look on in his direction, stunned into silence and blinking like he can’t quite process what had just happened. It happened fast, and it happened hard; an audible explosion of pent up distress that Subaru shouldn’t have bottled in the first place. Perhaps Tsumugi had been especially insensitive, and it’s not like he doesn’t feel BAD about it. He does, he didn’t mean to offend him like that. It was a simple question, one that’d led into more than either had asked for.

 

It really, really probably WAS his fault. No, definitely, he’d pried into something when Subaru was only letting out the tiny bit that he was comfortable with. He shouldn’t have pushed it, Subaru’s definitely private and he should’ve been thankful to get even that much, he should’ve reigned in his curiosity… Sighing softly and messing with his hair, he glances over his shoulder behind him, and though he can’t quite see who he’s talking to, he speaks with a tiny smile and a laugh, back to his normal tone despite the guilt lodging into his thoughts.

 

“…Natsume-kun, Sora-kun, you two can come out now.”

**Author's Note:**

> with this out of my system hopefully i can get back into the groove and write more of shinkai/finish Any Of My Reikao WIPs/????? WRITE.  
> im so sorry for the crimes against akehoshi subaru that i have committed


End file.
